👋 Hello

I am a lead data scientist at the FD Mediagroep, where I lead a team of four data scientists on the award winning BNR SMART Radio, and FD’s SMART Journalism projects. I obtained my PhD in Information Retrieval at ILPS (at the University of Amsterdam) in 2017 under supervision of prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke.

As explained in an earlier post, I am working on a simple method of extracting ‘important words’ from a text-entry. The methods I am using at the moment are frequency distributions and word collocations. I’ve bumped into some issues regarding finetuning my methods. Read on for a short explanation of my approaches, and some issues regarding them.

Frequency Distribution: POS-tagging y/n?

Extracting keywords by frequency distribution is nothing more than counting words and sorting the list of words by occurrence. Before doing this, I filter stopwords from the text entry. The short explanation on how I’m doing this (sourcecode available at github):

» Tokenize the text (using NLTK’s WordPunctTokenizer)
» Lowercase all the words
» ‘Clean’ the list by removing common stopwords from the list (using NLTK’s English stopwords-list)

This is straightforward enough, an example of the results (from the WikiPedia page of ‘Apoptosis‘):

Earlier I was thinking about using POS-tagging (Part-Of-Speech tagging to identify word-types) in order to only extract frequently occurring nouns. I figured losing relevant adjectives (such as ‘red’ in red blood cell) could be compensated by the word collocations extraction. POS-tagging the tokenized text, and retrieving only the most frequent nouns results in:

My problem here is I’m not sure which is ‘better’ (if any of those two), or if I should maybe use a combination of both. Also, I haven’t decided yet how to handle non-alphabetic words. Initially I planned on using regular expressions to filter non-alphabetic strings, but I figured later that it wouldn’t make sense in my case. In the above example, this would omit retrieving ‘p53’: a tumor suppressor protein (P53), which is very relevant.

With earlier playing around with POS-tagging I noticed the precision was not quite high enough to perform chunk extractions (by looking for specific phrases / grammatical constructions). Extracting only nouns does seem to do quite the job, even if I still miss some and get some false positives.

Word Collocations: Stopword filtering y/n?

Collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. I generate bi- and trigram word collocations, which mean ‘2-word strings’ and ‘3-word strings’. My issue here is whether or not to use stopword filtering. Here are the results of the word collocation function on the same WikiPedia page, the 1st list being the bigram collocations, the 2nd being the trigrams. Example without stopword filtering:

As you can see, lots of garbage in the first example, but still some collocations that do not appear in the cleaned version. Similar to the noun-extraction issue with the previous approach, I wonder if I should choose for one of the two, or combine them.

In other news

Finding Gensim has been a life-saver! Instead of using Difflib to compare two strings, I now use a proper text-similarity metric, namely cosine similarity measurement. I do so by creating a TF-IDF weighted corpus out of the (stopwords-cleaned) descriptions of ontology-terms I use, and calculating the cosine similarity between an input string and each entry in the corpus. Gensim makes this all a breeze to do. An example of the ouput:

>>> wikiGet('alzheimer')
alzheimer in wikiTxt
>>> descMatch(wikiTxt,5)
Label: Alzheimer's disease
Similarity: 0.236387
Description: A dementia that results in progressive memory loss, impaired thinking, disorientation, and changes in personality and mood starting in late middle age and leads in advanced cases to a profound decline in cognitive and physical functioning and is marked histologically by the degeneration of brain neurons especially in the cerebral cortex and by the presence of neurofibrillary tangles and plaques containing beta-amyloid. It is characterized by memory lapses, confusion, emotional instability and progressive loss of mental ability.
Label: vascular dementia
Similarity: 0.192565
Description: A dementia that involves impairments in cognitive function caused by problems in blood vessels that feed the brain.
Label: dementia
Similarity: 0.157553
Description: A cognitive disease resulting from a loss of brain function affecting memory, thinking, language, judgement and behavior.
Label: cognitive disease
Similarity: 0.13909
Description: A disease of mental health that affects cognitive functions including memory processing, perception and problem solving.
Label: encephalitis
Similarity: 0.138719
Description: Encephalitis is a nervous system infectious disease characterized as an acute inflammation of the brain. The usual cause is a viral infection, but bacteria can also cause it. Cases can range from mild to severe. For mild cases, you could have flu-like symptoms. Serious cases can cause severe headache, sudden fever, drowsiness, vomiting, confusion and seizures.

I’m not sure if the similarity numbers it produces indicate I’m doing something wrong (there’s no high similarity), but intuitively I would say the results do make sense.

As promised, I have spent the last two weeks generating a lot (but not quite 120) results. So let’s take a quick look at what I’ve done and found.

First of all, the Cyttron DB. Here I show 4 different methods of representing the Cyttron database, the 1st is as-is (literal), the 2nd by keyword extraction (10 most frequently occurring words, after filtering for stopwords), the 3rd is by generating synonyms with WordNet for each word in the database, the 4th is by generating synonyms with WordNet for each word of the keyword representation.

Cy-literal

Cy-keywords

Cy-WN

Cy-key-WN

Unique

19,80

3,23

97,58

17,59

Total

30,58

3,18

248,19

25,53

Next up, the Wikipedia-page for Alzheimer’s disease. Here I have used the literal text, the 10 most frequently occurring bigrams (2-word words), the 10 most frequently occurring trigrams (3-word words), the 10 most frequently occurring keywords (after stopwords filtering) and the WordNet-boosted text (generating synonyms with WordNet for each word).

Alz-Literal

Alz-bigrams

Alz-trigrams

Alz-keywords

Alz-WN

Unique

803

8

1

5

1385

Total

3292

8

1

6

22.195

The other approach, using the ontologies’ term’s descriptions didn’t quite fare as well as I’d hoped. I used Python’s built-in difflib module, which at the time seemed like the right module to use, but after closer inspection did not quite get the results I was looking for. The next plan is to take a more simple approach, by extracting keywords from the description texts to use as a counting measure in much the same way I do the literal matching.

All the results I generated are hard to evaluate, as long as I do not have a method to measure the relations between the found labels. More labels is not necesarily better, more relevant labels is the goal. When I ‘WordNet’-boost a text (aka generate a bunch of synonyms for each word I find), I do get a lot more literal matches: but I will only know if this makes determining the subject easier or harder once I have a method to relate all found labels to each other and maybe find a cluster of terms which occur frequently.

What’s next?

I am now working on a simple breadth-first search algorithm, which takes a ‘start’-node and a ‘goal’-node, queries for direct neighbours of the start-node one ‘hop’ at a time, until it reaches the goal-node. It will then be possible to determine the relation between two nodes. Note that this will only work within one ontology, if the most frequent terms come from different ontologies, I am forced to use simple linguistic matching (as I am doing now), to determine ‘relatedness’. But as the ontologies all have a distinct field, I imagine the most frequent terms will most likely come from one ontology.

So, after I’ve finished the BFS algorithm, I will have to determine the final keyword-extraction methods, and ways of representing the source data. My current keyword-extraction methods (word frequency and bi/trigrams) rely on a large body of reference material, the longer the DB entry the more effective these methods are (or at least, the more ‘right’ the extracted keywords are, most frequent trigrams from a 10-word entry makes no sense).

Matching terms from ontologies is much more suited for smaller texts. And because of the specificity of the ontologies’ domain, there is an automatic filter of non-relevant words. Bio-ontologies contain biological terms: matching a text to those automatically keeps only the words I’m looking for. The only problem is that you potentially miss out on words which are missing from the ontology, which is an important part of my thesis.

Ideally, the final implementation will use both approaches; ontology matching to quickly find the relevant words, calculate relations, and then keyword extraction to double-check if no important or relevant words have been skipped.

To generate the next bunch of results, I am going to limit the size of both the reference-ontologies as the source data. As WordNet-boosted literal term-matching took well over 20 hours on my laptop, I will limit the ontologies to 1 or 2, and will select around 10 represenatitive Cyttron DB-entries.

I am now running my Sesame RDF Store on my eee-pc (which also hosts @sem_web), which is running 24/7 and accessible from both my computers (desktop and laptop)! Also, I am now on GitHub. There’s more results there, check me out » http://github.com/dvdgrs/thesis.